Ken Mafli:
Well, hello everyone, and welcome to Rankings' live virtual event where we'll be discussing how you can supercharge your AI optimization efforts for your law firm. I'm Ken Mafli, the VP of marketing here at Rankings, and I'll be your host for today.
Today's webinar is one hour in length. We'll have approximately 45 minutes to talk through our findings before moving on to the Q&A session. Then we'll have about 10 to 15 minutes to answer any questions you may have.
Before we get started, I would like to introduce to you our speakers. First up, we have Chris Dreyer. Chris is our CEO and founder here at Rankings. He's built Rankings to be an elite law firm marketing agency that works with some of the biggest PI firms in the country, enabling them to dominate their core markets. He is also the host of the podcast Personal Injury Mastermind, author of the book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing: From Good to GOAT, and a member of multiple leadership councils, including the Forbes Agency Council, the Rolling Stone Culture Council, the Business Journal's Leadership Trust, Fast Company's Executive Board, and the Newsweek Expert Forum. Welcome, Chris.
Chris Dreyer:
Hey, thanks for having me.
Ken Mafli:
Next up, we have Kat Taylor. Kat is the director of link building here at Rankings, where she leads with over 20 years of experience in offsite SEO and digital PR. Known for building powerful backlink strategies that drive serious authority and visibility, she's helped top law firms dominate some of the most competitive markets in the US and beyond. She is also a member of multiple SEO roundtables, and if that weren't enough, in her spare time, she manages a small working farm with her family. Welcome, Kat.
It looks like we have a full house. So Chris and Kat, I will hand the mic to you.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I want to have a little bit of fun here before I even intro this title. So Kat has a tremendous amount of link building experience, and I wanted to just toss the question at her. The first link or first good story about link building you have, just to kind of open the gates.
Kat Taylor:
Yes. So back in 2005, 2006, it was the golden age of SEO. I mean, we were basically spamming the internet, and the way that my travel company worked was for link builders, we basically get a commission based on our exact match anchor texts that we were using. So it was a timeshare company, so it was timeshare resale, timeshare rental. Well, my first link, I was like, you know what? I think Google can understand if we use an LSI anchor, which is latent semantic indexing, which basically is kind of like it understands the similarity between the keywords. So if it's timeshare resale, it could be vacation rental or vacation resale.
So I used vacation rental and there were some contexts around it to help Google understand that it was timeshare, and I got in so much trouble for using that back then. It was like, "This is a waste of money. You shouldn't be doing this," blah, blah, blah. And so I was like, "Wow." And now you fast-forward to nowadays, and these are the types of anchor texts you want to use because you want to make sure that your anchor text is natural and diverse so that Google understands what your website's fully about, and so you're optimizing for a ton of keywords. So I just think it's very funny that I get in trouble for being a pretty awesome link builder.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, you were sharing the story. So I think it ties nicely into the 13 No BS Tips to Implement Now, So You Don't Get Left Behind. By the way, your SEO agency should be doing a lot of these, but I guarantee you there are some nuggets, there are some things that aren't being done, that you need to implement that are going to have a big impact on your visibility. So let's kick things off here.
Kat Taylor:
So think of it this way, all right, search engine is like a highway that drives traffic to your site when people know what they're looking for. So those are your keywords. AI is like the branded billboard that's down that highway. It helps people recognize, remember, and trust you. So in today's digital landscape, SEO gets you found. There's no denying that. But AIO makes sure that you're recommended. So this is pivoting more into kind of a brand building experience, which is where the digital PR stuff is going to come in.
So you need both working together to really grow your client base, which is what you guys want, I'd imagine. And if you're only doing one without the other, here's another analogy, it's like trying to win a race with one tire missing. You're still going to get there, but it's going to be a bumpy ride. So long story short, AIO is not replacing SEO, it's just enhancing it.
A similar thing would be when local SEO came out. It's just enhancing in more ways for people to find you. So you've got to start optimizing right now. And so I do have a goal and a challenge. So my goal today is to give you all a jargon-free experience where you get actionable items that you can then go and leave this webinar today and just go out and do it. Because the thing is, AI models are learning right now. So the new upcoming models, so in July there's a new one coming out, ChatGPT is getting a new version. Those LLMs are researching and learning today. So the faster you can get out and implement these tips, the better for you and your law firm.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. Yeah, you said a couple things there. You triggered me though, Kat, on the local SEO. It's the same thing, right? It's like the local SEO and a lot of the tactics people try to position, don't do organic SEO, just do local SEO. Well, hey dummy, you've got to do ... The same things that work for organic SEO help your local SEO. And so it's emphasizing certain characteristics. So I thought you teed that up really nice.
Number one out of the gate, schema markup. And I'm going to try to be as low jargon as I can as well. Schema is just the code that you wrap your content in on your website. It helps you show up in the AI overviews, in the rich snippets, and it helps you be discovered by the LLMs. So a few of them that we're seeing have the most impact are first the FAQ schema. For when you have questions, we're going to talk about these knowledge boxes, and just the way that individuals search on LLMs is different than Google search. On Google search, you might do just a few words, but on the LLMs, they're typically longer tail queries and very specific. So that's where these FAQ schema markups are contributing to visibility.
And basically, this is a component of technical SEO, and the main ones you need to be looking at are FAQ schema. You need to look at attorney schema, your legal service, organization. Those are some of the main ones. Your practice area pages, they have to be very unique. Google has too many landing pages that are being indexed, and they don't want to have duplicate pages or thin pages.
So the main takeaway here is utilize schema to mark up your content. You can go to schema.org or Merkle's Generator to do this. I would go to Merkle's Generator. You could pop in your content. It's very easy to use. But you need to do this right away. Also, don't take the cheap route or the lazy approach and try to do these site-wide schema markups. You need to be marking these pages up on an individual one-to-one basis.
Kat Taylor:
My bread and butter, launching a monthly digital PR campaign. There's so many awesome tools to help you all. I'm assuming you've all heard of HARO, which is Help A Reporter Out. There's also Qwoted and then there's Cision for press releases. But I'll get into all of these.
So you want to launch a monthly digital PR campaign so that the AI models look at you as an expert. Like I said in the beginning, this is brand building. You could be the greatest optimized website for a personal injury lawyer in the world, but you've still got to get your brand looked at as an expert. And one of the ways we do this is by digital PR. So how do these platforms really work? And they're really great for people that might not be working with marketing.
So you can go onto the platform, you basically set up an alert. It's really easy, it's very intuitive. It'd be like, what kind of journalists do you want to pitch? What's your niche? So you can set up alerts for keywords like personal injury, whatever law you're in, divorce law, liability, et cetera. And then you can set up to do daily emails. So every morning it'll send you, here's a bunch of different new journalists looking for expert comments. And you can go in there and figure out which ones you want to pitch, and then you go right in.
And what you can do is take your bio. So you create a bio profile with an expert quote, with your name, a really nice photo of you, an explanation of your law firm. Make it super personable because again, if the journalist takes that content, the AI is really looking to conversational content more so than super awesome marketing. So you want to make sure that your bio is super conversational and personal, but even one solid quote from a national outlet.
So you're going to be basically finding journalists that are from Forbes and New York Times and all these amazing sites. Even one solid quote in one of these publications can boost your authority so much in not only just AI, with the chances of them talking about you, but people in general. If they see you, "Oh wow, there's that lawyer." If I've got five different personal injury lawyers down the road, I'm going to choose the one that was on Forbes. That's just the way of life. But it also boosts your authority in SEO as well. So it's a huge, huge game changer if you're able to get your mention and link in one of these.
And that's another thing I wanted to say, as well, is in this AI digital market space, yes, unlinked mentions are becoming more and more important than they once were before because the LLMs can basically find you even if it's unlinked. So even if you get mentioned and you don't have a link, that's still going to be pretty useful in getting your brand out there. So super important.
Be proactive. Make sure that you're going out there and pitching. I try to pitch every day for our clients, even if it's something adjacent. So it doesn't have to be legal, it can be about finance. If you find something that's kind of in that same niche, try to get in there and keep your pitch short and relevant. Focus on how you can add value to their coverage. Don't do a long song and dance. A lot of times journalists are just going to delete that email, even though if it looks awesome and you're explaining everything you've ever done, they get a lot of emails a day, they're not going to be excited about a massive email. They'll just delete it.
So make sure it's very relevant, short, to the point, concise. Why does this matter to you, your AI strategy? Trust of the third-party signals that boost your brand's visibility across platforms, making AI models and humans alike look at you as legit. So yeah, super important stuff. Chris?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, the other thing too is, look, backlinks are one of the main factors that Google's used. Let's think about Google specifically, because it still has the lion's share of the market. When we're talking about AI overviews, 25% of the AI overviews are driven by the number one ranked search result in the organic search result. So these good backlinks, not only if they drive you up in the rankings, you also have a higher possibility of being referenced. It's a trust signal, and that's ultimately what they're trying to do. So this is just a big component of it. It's one of the top tactics for link building and getting on these source-based sites that are super authoritative.
Kat Taylor:
A hundred percent. All right, so legal directories, and I'm sure you've heard of many of them. There's Best Lawyers, there's Avvo, there's Martindale. These are super important to AI models because AI models look for structured data. And I know Chris was earlier talking about schema and markup. They look for super easy to digest content. These directories not only are super aged, but they're super niched down. It's basically, I mean, my friend just had, unfortunately she's going through a divorce and I was like, "Where'd you find your lawyer?" Because there are a bunch out here. And she's like, "Oh, I went to Avvo." So I feel like almost like AI is a person as well, and it's going to these high authoritative platforms that are super easy to find what you're looking for and easy to scrape. And so it's super important to get into least one of these. If you're not already, I bet you might already be in one.
So I'm going to explain to you what I would do in optimizing a directory listing. So there's two platforms you can do, free or paid. Get on there for free. I mean, just being on these platforms is super important. But then if you decide to up your game and try to get a preeminent, these little badges that you can get, that shows your authority even more to LLMs. So this is what I would say.
First thing is complete every field thoroughly. Include your full name, your firm name, and your practice areas, all of your practice areas. Make sure your firm name and your name match your GBP profile. You should have one. It's Google Business Profile. Any citation out on the internet should be exact so that not only the AI models can understand who you are and what your expertise lies in, it also is fantastic for SEO and people too. I'm going to be really confused if I'm looking for you and you've got a business name that's different across every platform. So super important. That's the number one thing, making sure that you're making sure your NAP consistency is there.
Write a client-focused bio. Again, I said this earlier for the HARO thing, you want to make sure it looks super conversational and personable. So just even add stories, things that are unique, not something that is just derivative or just drabble, like marketing dribble. Make your message unique and conversational.
Then you want to use some relevant keywords. Don't do the stuffing. This is a directory listing. You don't want it to look like a big spam page. So if you're in Chicago, maybe trickle in Boston, or Chicago personal injury lawyer, but then maybe that's it. Just make sure that it's at least there so that the relevancy context is there.
And then mention your key services. Think what would a client or AI ask to find someone like me? Really put that in the back of your brain. And then I would also do this. This is something I don't think anyone normally does. There usually is a field in these directory listings where you can add links to external resources. So what I would do is if I had multiple badges or awards or citations across a bunch of different platforms, I'd make sure I link to those because there's a web of relevance that AIs kind of rely on to understand who you are, what you're relevant in your niche.
So cross-linking to these other badges, to the badge on your site, make sure the badge is on your site, and linking back to all these different platforms, it's huge for AI models. So just remember to link out to all these platforms, but it also helps in tiered link building for the SEO side of this, where you're kind of boosting those backlinks from your site. So any time you add a link to another link, that actually boosts the authority to that backlink. So it's awesome for SEO and it's awesome for AIO as well.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I would just point out one other thing, too. The lawyers have a lot of restrictions on their use of superlatives, saying you're the best, you're specialized, so you want to take every advantage to be listed in a site like Best Lawyers or Super Lawyers. I know you get bombarded by the sales reps for some of these listings, but they're more important than ever because if you look at the top sources for many of these, especially you Perplexity users, they're going to be very common. So be cognizant of that. Try to get in those superlative named directories too.
Kat Taylor:
For sure.
Chris Dreyer:
Have you ever seen when you're reading something, the TL;DR, the too long, didn't read at the bottom of the page and it kind of summarizes it? Well, basically what we're finding is if you add a summarized version at the very top of a practice page or any individual page, it's what Google, these LLMs, sorry, these LLMs like to reference concise information. So at the top of your practice area pages, your location pages, put a query and then format it, bold it, the long tail query, just how you would ask the question on an LLM, not Google search or Bing or what have you.
But then do a two to three sentence summary of what the page is about. Try to incorporate your top keyword, and then a few bullet points. If you guys use ChatGPT, you're going to see the same type of summarization when you ask it questions. That's what it's looking for. It wants to reference something and have the summarized version.
So it goes without saying, too, that the way that you structure your content even further outside of the AI answer boxes, the summarized versions at the top of the page, each specific heading should be structured so that it has its own topic that you could go just to that heading and get the answer to your intent, to your question that you need. This is going to help the LLMs understand what your content is about, how to call information in and pull from it. So add summaries to the top of your core pages. That's the main takeaway here.
Kat Taylor:
Ooh, yeah, Reddit. I love Reddit. So yeah, Reddit is prime real estate for LLM training. I'm pretty sure they have a partnership, possibly, with OpenAI. And it's a conversational, super easy for LLMs to understand. It's frequently used to train the LLMs due to its rich, diverse, and conversational content. And that means your comments and contributions there may influence what AI models recommend and reference in the future.
So it's important to get in there, but it's a little harder to get in there. There's a lot of moderators, and if they think that you're being too salesy or you've got CTAs in your comment threads, they'll just delete it immediately. It won't even have a chance to get indexed. And so what I've found is the best way to do this is create a brand page first and kind of warm it up. You can use a branded consistent Reddit account. So it'd be like, I'll use me, Taylor Injury Law, to build long-term credibility. Common history is publicly visible and indexable, so every interaction is part of your firm's digital footprint.
So create that first and then start going into these subreddits, like legal advice. There's one that's personal finance, which is adjacent, but you can educate on how legal issues intersect with your money. Just try to find a bunch of different ones to comment on. But again, comment in a way that doesn't include a bunch of CTRs, or call to action, CTAs, and explain things, help people out. The more you're able to keep your footprint, and obviously you can put your brand in there, but I just wouldn't say, "Come visit my site," right after you try to help somebody out.
And then, yeah, so once you warm these accounts up, trust over time equals a huge GEO, or generative engine optimization advantage. Your participation will boost your off-site credibility. It enhances your AI presence, because again, they're learning from this platform. So the more you're able to spam Reddit with, not spam, but the more you're able to be on Reddit and be helpful and add your brand across that channel and different subreddits, the better for you.
So I would even go every morning. Maybe set up an alert. Hey, I'm going to Reddit. It doesn't matter. Don't get discouraged if your comments get removed or things get deleted, because if you do 10 in a day and you keep two and it stays and it gets indexed and no one ever removes it, then you've got two awesome comments on Reddit. So yeah, just keep in the game and I promise this is going to be super helpful for you.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'd say for the most part, don't use commercial handles. I would say go with the Reddit guidelines, keep the anonymous profiles, but the key here is to be active, engaged, provide value. So answer questions. Don't act with just complete commercial intent. And go in, answer questions. There will be questions about your firm or your practice or what have you, and you can answer them without trying to give a call to action. And those are going to be referenced, those are going to stick, they're going to be stickier. And a lot of times-
Kat Taylor:
[inaudible 00:24:11]
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, go ahead, Kat.
Kat Taylor:
Oh, sorry.
Chris Dreyer:
I'll say one other thing, one other thing. Google had a deal with Reddit. It's what powered their model. A lot of Gemini, a lot of the AI overviews, OpenAI. And between Reddit and Wikipedia, which we're going to talk about this in a future slide, these are two of the most popular cited sources where they're pulling the information from. So the more that you can participate on these sites and get your content to stick, the better.
Kat Taylor:
And I just want to say that I've had luck getting brands on Reddit, but yeah, what you were saying before, don't actively put your brand everywhere. Yes. But every so often, make sure you at least mention your brand so that it can get picked up by LLMs as well, just so you're not just a random anonymous. I mean, anonymous is great, but just make sure your brand is there somewhere. That's all I wanted to chime in with.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, fair.
Kat Taylor:
Okay, Wikipedia, yay. Another notoriously somewhat hard to get into type of platform, but it is doable. I've had pretty great success, so I'll explain why you want to be on there and how to do it. So it's another staple in training for almost all major language models out there. So that's the ChatGPTs, Gemini, Perplexity, pretty much all of them. That's because it's the structure of it, the neutrality, and the depth of information. And it's also a very aged marketplace. I mean, this is, Wikipedia goes back to basically the dawn of the internet. So it's basically as authoritative as you can get. Having a Wikipedia page can meaningfully help the models really understand your brand.
So to qualify for a Wikipedia page, your law firm has to meet the strictest notability standards. It's almost like trying to get your law firm in Encyclopedia Britannica. So obviously you're not seeing a lot of law firms in Encyclopedia Britannica, so now you kind of understand what their notability guidelines are. So it's based on the quality and the independence of external resources.
And what do I mean by that? All right, so basically what you do is you go in there, you can create a sandbox page and write up the details of your business, and usually try to keep it pretty simple, when it started, principal attorney, couple other things in there, because you're going to go back eventually and edit it, and the more you edit it, the more it gets patrolled, which means eventually it will get indexed, hopefully. So you start off pretty basic, add your external resources in there, which is notable cases. So one second.
I'm not saying you close the case and you maybe pay for a post about it or something. I mean, you did an amazing, one of the biggest cases in the state's history and you changed the law or you did something really great community-wise for your local community and someone wrote about it, like someone in your local newspaper, a bigger publication like Times or something like that. It has to be a third party reference. It can't be something from your website, it can't be a press release that you paid for. It can't be anything paid. And the thing is, with the patrollers on Wikipedia, they are very in tuned with what is paid, directories they know are paid. They know what is paid. You can't really pass anything by them. So there's not even a point in trying that.
So if you get at least five resources ready to go, submit that in, get your little sandbox page ready, you can then submit to the moderators, and then it takes a while because they get a lot of, you can imagine they're getting a lot of pages. Everybody wants to be in Wikipedia, especially nowadays with the LLMs. So it does sometimes take a while for a new page patroller to come through. You can speed the process up sometimes if you go in and make small little edits, which is why, again, I said earlier, to make it very simple in the beginning. So that way you're able to get the new page patrollers to look at your page in a faster, like if they accept your page, it takes about 90 days for it to be indexed in Google. And then once it's indexed, it's pretty much there.
So anyone can make a Wikipedia page, but to keep it up and indexed and new page patrollers to accept it, that's a whole different story. And I think it's funny, I was talking to my husband and he's like, "I thought anyone could make a page on Wikipedia." Yeah, you can, but it'll be gone in 24 hours. And what's the point of that? So this is really, I mean, this is a tried and true method. I've gotten a bunch of different law firms on Wikipedia. I'm proud of myself for that. And so this is what you've got to do.
So let's say you do everything you're supposed to do. You create a page. There's no promotional tone. Remember, never promote on these types of platforms. Everything looks good, but then the new page patroller says, "Eh, you don't have enough notable external resources," so the page gets removed. What do you do next? Well, there is a solution. It's Wikidata. Wikidata also feeds Google's knowledge panel, and LLMs also learn off of Wikidata. It's basically a stripped down Wikipedia page. So I call it WGP. So it's like Wikipedia Google Profile or Business Profile. It's basically just NAP data, the year your firm was created or launched, and then the languages you speak, and it's basically just that.
But they index pretty fast, pretty much anyone can make one, and they're super, they're still very, I mean, obviously Wikipedia is a little bit more important to LLMs, but this is kind of a way around it if you get denied a page. So again, you don't need to meet strict notability guidelines, so you don't even have to bring external resources to the party for this. Just go in, create your business profile, and submit it, and it should be fine. It's easier to create than the profile for Wikipedia. And again, it's good for Google knowledge panels, it's good for AI summaries, and voice search answers as well. So if you're asking Alexa, it sometimes can feed to that as well. So it basically helps AI models connect the dots between your brand, the founders, locations. You can add multiple locations. You can add your awards and your industries as well.
So yeah, it's what I would do if you go through, I would say start with Wikipedia, because again, it's a little bit more robust. It's a lot more content in there. You're going to have your external resources. So that's going to show the notability. But if you cannot get a Wikipedia page, then I would definitely say go for a Wikidata page.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, to be notable, you've got to do notable things. Write a book, do out-of-the-box things that are out of normal. By the nature of doing things different, you automatically stand out.
Kat Taylor:
I completely brushed over the fact that it's 48.9% ChatGPT utilizes that. So basically 48.9% of the learning data is from Wikipedia, essentially, and that's where it's learning from. So it's very important for ChatGPT and everything else as well. But I wanted to at least underline that little percentage there since I just skipped over it. Okay, you can go back to the next slide.
Chris Dreyer:
This is, look, Google and other LLMs and search engines are trying to organize the web. So there's been numerous different topics or names for this, this tactic, but it's writing your content within topic clusters. So I'll give you a couple examples of things that I've seen, how it relates to Google and how it relates to AI overviews in particular. So one thing that's pretty common in the mass tort space is you want to write about lawsuits and settlements, but there's this draw to also write about side effects and the drug component.
Well, Google's trying to organize, is this a medical site or is this a legal site? So you have to group things properly. If you just write an Ozempic side effects page and you're trying to utilize it to improve your Ozempic lawsuits, you're going to be at an uphill battle. That's why sites like Drug Watch, those that try to blend this together, have been struggling and have been dropping in traffic significantly.
So it basically means that you have to use sub-folders or perfect internal link building to create these associations and these groupings. So whenever you're writing about a topic, they have to all be grouped together. So if you're writing about car accidents, then in your sidebar, you don't want to show slip and falls. If you are trying to rank in St. Louis, you want St. Louis based content in your sidebars, in your related pages, in your menus.
You can go a step further and have custom menus on internal pages to basically force these associations, to force these pairings. Ultimately, Google and these LLMs are trying to make discovery easy, and if you group things together, it creates associations and it helps them call your information to their platforms. That's the biggest takeaway here.
Kat Taylor:
Oh boy, I love this one. So obviously you want to earn mentions and links. I mean, we already talked about the reputable news sources in the beginning. We were talking about HARO and Qwoted. But you want to, I look at this slide as more of a local magazine type thing. So local government sites, local chambers of commerce, local magazine publications so that you're very prevalent and prominent in your area. So you're not only getting the superlative mentions, but you're also getting the local mentions as well.
So I want to give you a little fun activity to find these opportunities. So what I would do is you go to Google Maps, type in whatever city you're in, so we'll say Chicago. Boom, Chicago. So Chicago is, if you see the word Chicago, that is what Google deems as the city center. So then go into nearby and search for chamber of commerce, hit enter. You're going to see all the little dots. The chambers that are closest to that city center are looked at as more geo relevant than the ones further away.
So create a list. The top of the list will be the ones closest to city center and then go all the way down. Then once you're done with that list, go back to the search and then search for business association. Do it again. And then the third one is going to be magazine publisher. Do it again. Create those lists, and then you're going to basically, whoever runs outreach, or if you want to do it yourself, just go ahead and contact, there's usually going to be business listings in these publications, or at least the chambers and the business association.
But then for the magazines, just look around and see if they have any legal content on there, and then go ahead and create a simple outreach email, state, "I'd like to be featured in your publication. How can we work together?" But yeah, that's the easiest way to find geo relevant authority mentions and links for this whole thing. So I would strongly advise doing that. But yeah, the reason you want to do this is to get that authority in your local area so that the LLMs can understand that you are an authority in your local area, essentially.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so it's relevance around a geography, right? That's the key thing you're looking for. It's a trust component as well. Again, if you're trying to rank in St. Louis and you're associated with St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, associations, those magazine publications, it's a better trust signal, but also just it creates that pairing and creates those relationships. So it works for organic SEO, but it also helps the LLMs as well.
Last October, last PIMCON, if you guys were in the crowd, I talked about this, entities. Named entities in all content. So again, this is just another way to create relationships and trust. If I'm trying to rank a page for a particular geography or topic, the thing that I like to do is I like to go to Wikipedia, and I'm going to stick with St. Louis. Go Cards, by the way.
So go to Wikipedia. You're trying to rank for a St. Louis car accident lawyer. You type in St. Louis. What are all the things that pop up related to St. Louis? The Arch, the barbecue restaurants, the science center, all these things. Those are your targets. Those are the words and the entities that you should be trying to incorporate into your content if possible. Also, your pictures and your alt text, you take a picture next to the Arch or at a nearby restaurant. You can include that in your alt text and tie those back to those entities. Do the same thing for your practice areas. You're trying to create relationships. That's the key thing here too.
The other thing about Wikipedia, and I just want to talk, we've talked a ton about Wikipedia, but when you're trying to get listed in Wikipedia, the first thing that you should do is see if there's anything referenced that you have an association with. I'll give you, I can't name the individual, but I would say one of the biggest firms in Colorado was in a bunch of cases. He was involved in the cases, but this individual's name wasn't referenced. So all we had to do is we had to go and edit those to reference the attorney that was mentioned. So then when we went to create his page, then we could cite back to those.
So there's a lot of these types of scenarios that you can do just to see if you have any existing reference and it makes you that much stickier. But going back to the entities, go to Wikipedia, type in your city, see what's referenced. Try to incorporate images or that content into your pages. In particular, your Google Business Profile destination pages. And the reason is it doesn't matter if it's social media or an LLM or search engine, they want to keep you on platform. So if you go to Facebook and you do Facebook ads, your pay per click on Facebook is going to be cheaper if you stay on Facebook. If you drive it to an external landing page, it's going to cost more. You move off platform.
The same happens with the AI overviews. The references are going to be back to your GBP profile, your destination URLs. So those pages that you use for your destination URLs, they need to be beefy. Don't just do, again, I'm going to use St. Louis car accident lawyer, and it's just a wall of text and keywords. What attorneys actually practice that area of law? They should be on that page, not just the about page. They should be on that page. What's nearby from a directions perspective? Can you take a picture of the building? Some of these buildings that you lease from, like there's the Missouri Athletic Center. It's next to a nearby building that many attorneys share spaces with. You could take a picture of that from your window or from the parking lot, and that creates a relationship of trust.
So we see this time and time again. If you look at some practice area pages and how thin they are compared to the ones that cite and utilize entities, they just rank substantially better. It's because there's the trust signals, there's the relationship pairings. And I encourage all of you to go the extra mile in particular on these destination URLs. They're more important than any other page on your website, outside of your homepage, contact page, and your about page.
Here's another one. Look, you want to be the source. You want to be the source. You want people citing you, linking to you. That's why a lot of times on these sales pages, these practice area pages, I like to incorporate statistics because then they can earn backlinks naturally. One of the things that I'll tell you that we've had a lot of success with over the years is the Department of Transportation. They're so behind. I mean, how many websites do you go to that says there were so-and-so accidents from 2019? Like really, six years ago? That's what we're saying? That's how many accidents are here? So they have the data, but I guarantee it's not organized.
But hey, guess what, guys? There's a thing called ChatGPT. So you can just give it the raw data and say, "Organize this for me," and things that in the past, we worked with a firm out of Houston. We made this accident map for the most frequent accidents for intersections. It was a firm, Stewart Guss. They got mentioned on TV, et cetera. We made this accident map for him. I don't know how many months it took us to do the Department of Transportation data. And I look back and I'm like, Jesus, I could have just uploaded all that data to ChatGPT and got it in seconds. That's the things that you need to be thinking about.
I also just think of not only proprietary stats, but proprietary information or surveys. I don't love surveys because they're more subjective than objective, but you can do some cool things with Survey Monkey. It can give you a list to disperse. If you don't, like how am I going to get enough people to survey? Survey Monkey has some services to help facilitate that. But be the source. It'll help you acquire those links naturally, and you'll be the reference point in the LLMs.
Kat Taylor:
I'd also say, if you keep it long tail, meaning you don't just do top car accident or car accidents statistics near me, whatever, do something super long tail that's kind of adjacent to that topic, journalists are going to eat that up. They get pitched all the time about, "Look at this data I've created," car accident stuff.
Okay, well, we're getting pitched a lot of car accident statistics. So if you can think of, get an ideation going and brainstorm ideas that correlate with car accident or with slip and fall, and think of outside of the box ideas that you can curate your data, that's going to go a lot further with journalists in my experience. So just a little bonus tip there.
So AI models are trained to prioritize real, verifiable insights. So you want to make sure, again, I was saying earlier, conversational, you want to make sure that you're an expert in the field. So you could literally have a managing attorney, intake specialist, a paralegal, a trial lawyer, different people in your firm, and you could have these quotes within your content so that it's easy for LLMs to pick up on, but also journalists to quote and throw you into an article for backlinks as well. So a name, quote adds credibility, it adds context, it adds authority to your page. These are all qualities that AIs are going to reward.
So turn every page into a thought leadership platform. Every blog post or service page should feature a pulled quote. I guess you don't have to overdo it, but I would at least put pulled quotes, which is, I wish there was an example. I guess there's one there. I would put them at least on your transactional pages, your most important bread and butter pages. And then be specific. Generic equals invisible. So avoid general phrases like, "Accidents can be pretty complicated." Tie content to your firm's unique experience, your case history, your jurisdiction, any specific nuance that you can think of to further differentiate yourself.
And then attributed quotes support both EEAT, which is experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, but it also supports AIO, and then Google AI models both elevate named consistent voices. So it's super important. I have noticed a lot of these quotes getting pulled into AI queries. So it's one of these things that I don't think a lot of people are doing so far, but it's something that I think is going to move the needle in your strategy.
So standardizing your brand anchor text, this is going to give your anchor text more context to your brand. So let's say yes, Smith Injury Law, personal injury attorneys serving Austin, Texas. That includes your brand, but it also shows AI and SEO the context surrounding your brand, what you guys do. So I've actually been implementing, I call them compound branded, but I implement a lot of exact match mix with brand to kind of tell search engines what you do, but also AI models as well.
It doesn't have to be in the link. You can put your practice area surrounding in the unlinked content. That's fine too. Like I said earlier, LLMs are very good at understanding the context surrounding your brand and your anchor text. So update your directory listings with this kind of stuff. Go back in, look at your backlinks, see if you can update these to further add your brand. If there's not branded, if you get a lot of exact match. And then, yeah, use exact match, NAP data and brand terms everywhere.
So if you rebrand, make sure you're going to all the platforms and updating that information. Or let's say you get out of personal injury and you've decided to do divorce all of a sudden, please make sure someone goes out there and updates all of it. It is all important. Even the smallest citation can confuse an AI or a person or Google. So just be sure to be consistent and then also add in that contextual information about your practice areas and your brand.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm just going to be really brief on this because Kat's already hit on it and we're kind of coming up on time because I want to hit some of the Q&A. Look, this has been talked about, EEAT, making you an authority, an expert on your pages. So make sure your attorney bios are really robust. One of my favorite bios is Kline & Specteor. I think it's Mr. Specter has an amazing bio. Go check it out. It lists all his cases, all of his awards. It is very, very thorough. It's going to show, if you ever get an external audit by a Google individual to rate your site, there's no question then it's going to pass every trust score there is.
I also just want to mention that in my opinion, most of your destination URLs for Google, again, should encompass attorney bios, the credentials, the bar numbers, courtroom experience, all the social proof signals on those pages. Maybe not your tertiary pages on maritime law, unless you're a maritime attorney that only does that. And also, you want to embed your Google map on those core pages.
So make yourself an expert. Do the notable things, make sure those are incorporated on your key pages from a trust perspective. Google is looking, it wants to provide the most trusted information to consumers, and if there's a question mark around that, you're going to struggle. So that's why you see a lot of these, again, of these mass tort sites, they have the nurse practitioners, the physician side, they have these physicians-based authors to talk about the medical side of the content, and they have the attorneys talk about the lawsuits and settlement side. It's all related to this trust component for EEAT.
Kat Taylor:
I have something else to add. So the awards, super important. So what I always do whenever I'm looking around with AI, I always ask, hey, why did you select these certain lawyers for, I don't know, I'm going to use Chicago again. I don't know why, but best Chicago person, why did you do it? And it'll tell you exactly.
So if you ever get confused as why is this guy getting mentioned, it'll tell you exactly like, hey, these awards. It's always awards though, Chris. Every single time. There's a whole award, I guess there's an award recognition pattern that it utilizes as well. So the awards are super important. Every single time I ask why they pull a certain list of lawyers, it's like the awards is a preeminent. Also, that wording, use preeminent. I know you probably can't because of legal reasons.
Chris Dreyer:
Well, Martindale has an award called the Preeminent Attorney.
Kat Taylor:
Yes, but you're right though. You can't use those words on your actual site. But anyway, get those awards. They're super, super important. And every single time I ask AI, it always comes up with, this lawyer has a bunch of awards. So it does look for those types of wording as well. Just wanted to add that in.
All right, to the Yelp. Bonus tip. Hooray. Yelp. Yes. So I believe it is, you might have to correct me, I might be wrong, Chris. I think it's OpenAI who has the partnership with Yelp, right? Okay.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. So I think right there, Microsoft owns OpenAI, Microsoft owns Bing. Bing uses Yelp. The other thing, too, most searches now, most of your consumers, I think 75 to 80%, are going to use a mobile device. And if they go to Apple Maps and they don't go to Google Maps, which is a ton of people, the first thing that it references is Yelp. So be cognizant of your Yelp reviews and don't just ignore them because they're not ranking on the first page of Google, because guess what, guys, Bing, which powers OpenAI, uses Yelp.
So make sure that your reviews, that you're coaching up your consumers to incorporate information and context around why they hired you, because you're the best attorney, because you won these awards, because you're an expert on car accidents. They can say that stuff. It's not you claiming that you're the expert or the specialist, but they can say it. And that's what you want, because all these LLMs are going to source that information.
Kat Taylor:
And for the love of God, please make sure that your address and your business name is correct on Yelp, as it is on your GBP. A lot of times people forget to be consistent across these platforms, and now that Yelp is so important to AI, you want to make sure that you're optimizing and making sure that your NAP information is consistent with your GBP as well, so that AIs can understand who you are, as well as all the other search engines as well. So make sure you do that.
Chris Dreyer:
Yep, nailed it.
Kat Taylor:
Nice.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, guys, so best practices for AI is still best practices for SEO. Having said that, there's some little tweaks. The summaries on the top of the practice pages, emphasizing Yelp and some of these other sites significantly more than maybe you did in the past, like Wikipedia and your contributions to Reddit. Those aren't common things that old school SEOs, even like myself, used to place importance on until now. Now that they're utilized and they're training these LLM models, you have to shift your focus to these other areas.
Kat Taylor:
At the end of the day, it's just another way for people to find you, and that should be very exciting for us all. I love digital marketing because it changes all the time. It's a fluent, living, breathing thing. We're going to have something new by next year, and I'll be on this webinar probably talking about something else. So it's super exciting.
And I would love to help anyone that needs my help. My email address is at the end. But this is what I live and breathe for. I've spent so many years of my life, much like you guys have for your law firms, really honing in on something. And so yes, please email me if you have any questions about any of the things that I talked about at all. I would love it. We can nerd out.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, same. So I want to start hitting some questions. I don't want to miss any. Let's nail those.
Ken Mafli:
Sounds good. Okay, so first one, we face a lot of pushback from Reddit moderators for using a commercial handle. You kind of touched on this, Chris, but anything you want to follow up with?
Chris Dreyer:
Now, you just need to have a trusted profile, right? Meet their guidelines. Certain of the internal forums and groups that you join have different rules than Yelp itself, so you just need to abide by those. But have a trusted profile. Kat, anything?
Kat Taylor:
Yeah, trusted profile. Or if you can't get your brand its own profile, just be anonymous and then just work on commenting. Just start commenting instead of having your own, because if you can get your comments indexed, then that's just as helpful as having your own business platform, especially if you're mentioning your brand in your comment. So I would keep it anonymous if you can't get your brand up there.
Ken Mafli:
Okay, second, rapid fire, Jeremy asks, "Embedding Google Maps on core pages, does the footer count or actually in the page content outside of the footer or in the body content?"
Chris Dreyer:
I'm more of a fan of the individual pages. Google places more weight on the body, just like they do a link that's contextual in the body of the content, as opposed to the header, sidebar, or the footer. So I would absolutely contextually embed it on those main practice area pages.
Ken Mafli:
How about you, Kat?
Kat Taylor:
I agree.
Ken Mafli:
Perfect. Okay, the next one comes from Chris. Everything we're talking about, "How does this scale to firms with multiple locations in multiple states?"
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, good question. So let's get down to it. First, there's a ton here, Kat, so you're going to fill in some gaps. The structure of your website should all be organized around a particular location. So when you have St. Louis and Chicago, you should have St. Louis sub-folders and organize. That's the easiest way to do it, as opposed to trying to do it internal with internal links. You could do it also with internal links and not utilize it from a URL perspective, but I think it forces your team and it mitigates or reduces errors if you have these sub-folders that content around.
Also, meta tags themselves don't help your rankings, but there are certain WordPress themes that will use meta tags to form relationships on the page. So you can tag a page with certain keywords and then have a related [inaudible 00:58:01] plugin at the bottom that creates those relationships. So you could have custom headers internally that only show that specific location. Other things, like all your locations need to have enough reviews for LSA, for Yelp, for Google Business Profile. I see a lot of firms try to open these fake third party offices that aren't staffed. They don't have the signage. They're sharing with a co-counsel. They need to be legit offices, staffed, real buildings, not a trash can that's been verified just to get the address. Also, the consumers need to want to go there and visit it.
Then there's a component for the multi offices. You need to build anchor text profiles to those internal pages to create relevancy around those different areas. Citations for [inaudible 00:59:01], each location, it's going to be basically compounding your best practices for SEO for each individual location.
Kat Taylor:
And I'd also make sure that you point at least one local, like I was talking about earlier, how you Google Map, look at all those different local chambers of commerce, all that kind of stuff. For every single local page ... So if you're a personal injury lawyer, you've got your local PI page. That's like the hub. Make sure you've got one local link towards each one of those.
So if you've got Chicago, again, I'm going to use that again, get the Chicago Chamber of Commerce going to that page, and then for your other location, get that Chamber of Commerce going to that page. Honestly, I've seen some of the best pages rank with just one backlink because it's just one local backlink, and then obviously your citations, your local citations. So make sure that your local pages, the hub, have at least one to two of those really awesome local authority backlinks, and that's going to make all the difference, for sure.
Chris Dreyer:
Yep.
Ken Mafli:
Awesome. All right. Heidi asks, "Any tips for getting our five-star Yelp reviews to remain unfiltered?"
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, so any Yelp owners here, can you earmuff? So yeah, it's tough. If you send them a direct link and they go there, it'll look unnatural, and they'll bury them and it's super frustrating. You'll get these legit reviews, and then the first one-star reviews hits and it will stick, and all your good ones are filtered. So what you're looking for is trusted profiles to leave you a review on Yelp.
So when you get a Google review by a Google guide, those typically are trusted because they've reviewed many entities. It's not somebody created a new Gmail profile and went and left a review. You're looking for the same type of thing. You're looking for the Yelpers. So there's a few tactics that you can do to determine who are actual Yelpers who use Yelp? Who's taking pictures of the food?
If you sync your Facebook profile to Yelp, it will show you your friends that are on Yelp, and it will show you how many connections and how often they've left reviews on Yelp. Those are the ones, when you get a review from one of those individuals, those stick. If it's somebody that's never left a Yelp review, I don't care if they come in from the homepage and do a search to find your business, a lot of those get filtered out. So you're looking for the Yelpers just like you're looking for the Google guides to get those to stick.
Ken Mafli:
Kat, any thoughts there?
Kat Taylor:
I just agree. I mean, I don't disagree. I said I agree.
Ken Mafli:
It's a mic drop, folks. It's a mic drop. Okay.
Kat Taylor:
[inaudible 01:01:56]
Ken Mafli:
Last question before we wrap. Kathleen asks, "Does social media and video posts help?"
Chris Dreyer:
Oh, yeah, big time. You're seeing Instagram reels referenced, due to how they're titled and their metadata. Not only that, just from a marketing best practices, if you look at how many different types of content are on the first page of Google, you've got videos, you've got the social snippets, you've got the X tweets, they absolutely help.
I will say one particular tip is for each video that you have, you want its own dedicated page that uses video schema and video SEO best practices. So if you make a great video on a particular topic, for the love of God, don't just drop an embed on a page that exists. Create its own unique page and use the video schema markup. That will help it from a discovery standpoint in Google search as well as the LLMs.
Kat Taylor:
Can I say one thing? Speaking of videos, though, I will say, moving forward, I really think that using stock photos is something that's kind of dying out. I don't think the AI models can understand or differentiate when you use the same, I mean, I've seen one photo of a car accident, it's like a BMW that's been smashed up. It's on everyone's website. And so I think these videos and really spending time to create these unique videos and embedding those into your site is going to be a lot more useful than a stock photo. Just wanted to add that in there.
Chris Dreyer:
And by the way, for those of you who have received an email from, oh, you're using so-and-so stock and send me your license or pay a $300 fine, just be prepared to get more of those emails because they're desperate. They need to make money because AI is about to take them out. They're going to be one of the first companies taken out. So if you're using stock photos and you've used them in the past, make sure you got your licenses all busted up, buttoned up.
Ken Mafli:
I love it. Okay, well wow, this has been a jam packed session. We are over time, but I'm so glad we stayed on. Some of that Q & A was actually very informative. So number one, thank you for asking the questions, and Chris and Kat, thank you for the answers. This has truly been a jam packed session.
All right, as we wrap up, I do want to close with one final thought. If you're optimizing for AI, just like Chris and Kat have already said, your SEO only becomes that much stronger. Why? By focusing on world-class digital PR, high quality backlinks, a human friendly presence on forums, and building trust through reviews and engagement, it all follows SEO best practices. But the uncomfortable truth is it's hard to do and it can be time consuming. In many ways, offsite SEO is a 20 round boxing match, and Kat, by the way, is the undisputed champion.
Kat Taylor:
Yeah.
Ken Mafli:
I mean, this is just real talk here, folks. So take what we've given you today and begin to build your plan, but give yourself a break and take it one step at a time. As long as you bring value and build with a client in mind, the LLMs will reward you.
That all said, finding the right marketing partner to supercharge your optimization efforts is essential. They can help outline your goals, construct the right strategy, build the right content, and make sure you are hitting your goals.
As always, we are here to help to get the most out of your lead generation efforts. Our expertise and understanding of the legal market puts you, our clients, in the winning position. So contact us today to see how you can get the most out of your marketing campaigns. You won't be disappointed. Bye for now.
